


can't take it with you

by girljustdied



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-09-30 18:03:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17228645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girljustdied/pseuds/girljustdied
Summary: "everything rough becomes delicate when you love it. more roses, more roses, more roses."





	can't take it with you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstaudrina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/gifts).



> prompt was "don’t worry. all is as it was meant to be. it was meant to be lonely, and terrifying, and unfair, and fleeting. don’t worry."

High-pitched ringing like a cherry light circling from ear to ear, palms throbbing with an insistent, racing pulse, and mind as unfocused and wild as the air full of dust and debris around her, she thinks:  
  
_Not much difference being on one side of the barrel or the other._

Frank would call bullshit on that.

For now, flat palm between her shoulder blades, he gets her into the relative safety of her building’s stairwell. Her harsh breaths echo off the concrete. He’s silent. Puts his hands on her skull, her throat, her sides—a no-frills search for bullet wounds, she realizes.  
  
Still shaking, struggling not to flinch away until he moves back on his own accord, she gasps, “Are you okay?”  
  
He hums an affirmative, attention splitting from her to their surroundings.

_There’s no time_. Nonsense thought. Frank had just given her more by saving her life.

He presses a burner phone into her hands. Tells her, “I think you and me could help each other,” and gestures for her to head downstairs towards the approaching police sirens. Sprints up towards the roof exit before she can respond, out of her sightline, gone.

When she closes her eyes, the scrape of his voice joins that ringing sound. Slack-jawed, her right hand flexes around a phantom gun.

“How?” she asks no one, voice fuzzy and unreal.

Her hair is a tangled mess from the weight of his hands trying to shield her from bullets. Fact.

-

The man is a silhouette. It could be anyone.

“Frank.” Something in her releases. Her left heel lifts from the cement.

-

Nights alone in bed she remembers the rip of a serrated blade through kevlar, and gunshots shaking the thin diner wall that had separated them at the time. She most clearly remembers the blood in his wheezing breaths, after.

“Get away from this thing.” A plea. “Get away from me.”

She’d been trembling from the whiplash of his hands on a coffee cup, thumb carefully tracing the ceramic rim. Couldn’t let go of his eyes on her as she flinched at some innocuous sound, and how they narrowed with understanding.

He was the sound. “Just stay away from me.”

It should not comfort her. That car turned upside-down feeling, seat belt carving lines into her chest as she struggles to right herself. It wasn’t all she knew. It wasn’t all she’d been. Should have told him that he was right. Instead of staying put, muffling her cries with the palm of her hand, she should have dried her eyes and grabbed her bag and ran. But he’s the one who’d left the crime scene first. Always was.

She can picture Frank’s hand reaching through the driver’s side window, pulling her out with a grunt. Her hair snagged in his watch, his mouth, the zipper of his coat. It fixes nothing.

Still, it helps her sleep.

-

She keeps the white roses on her dresser. Cares for them religiously. Every morning pokes her index and middle fingers into the pot, testing the moisture of the soil. Dirt washing down turns the water circling her shower drain muddy. Like blood in a black and white photograph.

When she pricks her thumb on a thorn, she sucks at the wound until the flow stops.

-

His lips on the swell of her cheek is not a tender thing. It’s stones in her pockets. Roots her feet to the earth, halting her pacing. She does not turn her mouth towards his. Does not touch the spot of skin when he steps back, or regard him as he walks away. Only breathes, shivers in her exhales. The wind from the river is frigid and sour.

If someone were to show her a photograph of the moment, the air would hiss out of her in disbelief as if through a puncture wound. How could they have survived braced so precariously over the void between turmoil and absence. It’s more fantasy than reality. She’d counted the seconds: ten.

Had wanted to say, as he leaned in, _Frank, stop. You’re scaring the shit out of me. It’s worse than all the blood and carnage, that I can handle—please—don’t—_

Ten seconds.

-

Fact: she hasn’t had sex in over a year. Can only get off on her own loneliness. Prefers the detachable shower head in her new apartment because she doesn’t have to assign an identity to what is bringing her pleasure. With her fingers come the stray thoughts that they’re too thin, or her nails too long. Same goes for vibrators. With a rush of water it’s just a quick jolt of pleasure in the mornings and, on particularly grimy days, again at night. Rations of ecstasy to get her through.

Through what?

Karen asks questions for a living. Tries to see through all the bullshit. But she is not the subject; she is the conduit.

-

She puts the flowers on her windowsill.

An unknown number texts her the address of an abandoned warehouse two avenues west of her place. This is Frank’s protocol.

She types out and erases dozens of replies. Sends none. Takes a shower, and goes to bed.

-

Someone is at her front door. Bangs on it with the bottom of their fist, makes the walls rattle. When she turns on a light in the living room, the noise stops. She eyes the shifting shadows of two booted feet through the crack between the door and the floor.

“Karen.” Frank’s voice. In her dreams he never breaks down the barrier, never picks the bedroom window locks from the fire escape outside. It’s just like this. “Open up.”

There is a shrillness to her refusal, “I’m okay. I’m sorry. It’s nothing.”

“Open the door.”

She does.

The instant he glimpses the hot blush on her face, he reads her, “You can’t risk contacting me just because you’re looking for some company. That’s not how this works.”

“Yeah,” she locks the door behind him, “what’s ‘this,’ exactly?”

The muscle in his jaw ticks. “Damned if I know.”

She crosses her arms over her chest and mutters, “Yeah.”

They linger in the cramped ten square feet of her foyer, backs pressed to opposite walls. Her gaze dips; she wonders where the guns are hidden on his body. If there’s body armor under his hoodie, or soft, warm flesh.

“You gonna do what I asked, Karen? Stay out of this thing?”

“You’re the one that roped me into it. You have to know that. Don’t you?”

-

It’s going to leave a bruise. The barrel of the gun awkwardly jammed into her chin to hide the missing clip. He wouldn’t use a loaded gun, but this he can do for her.

-

“You’re disengaged,” Ellison tells her. “It’s hurting your work.”

“Bullshit,” is Karen’s immediate, tired rebuttal. She stays seated at her desk, head propped up by leaning against her left hand. “Want me to call in Janelle to recite readership stats again?”

Tapping a pen against a pad of paper, “I’m not talking about clicks and you know it.”

She had tried to hold onto the roses. Pruned the leaves and stems that showed signs of decay, or a white dusting of mold. Moved the pot to the kitchen where there was more light. It wasn’t enough.

“Look,” Ellison’s newspaperman face betrays little, “I don’t know if you really thought that Castle was dead along with the rest of us or not the first time around. But now,” he clears his throat, “that story seems closed.”

Poetic, even. Dead at the scene of the same merry-go-round he’d lost his family to.

She nods. Bites her lip. Holding back sobs for too long unlocks the taste of copper in her mouth, throat and soft palate raw. Knows she can’t speak or the words will do her in. Her face hurts, tension spidering out from the back of her jaw, her temples.

Can’t help herself, voice wavering despite the forcefulness of her questions: “And you think, what, that the best thing for me to do is to wallow? Ignore the world around me?”

“I think you need a break.”

-

_There’s no time_ , she remembers thinking. If she’d closed the breath of space between their lips she would have only tasted Frank’s blood. The freight elevator contained more than one exit, more than enough space to allow them to ricochet apart, and they had.

On paid leave, she has nothing but time to burn. Binges on soap operas and wonton soup and paints her nails purple, then black. Reads trashy paperbacks and sleeps fourteen hours a day.

“You’ve really done it now,” she talks to herself, staring down at a broken glass at her feet.

A week in, her phone vibrates with a text. New unknown number, same warehouse Frank had last suggested. With a grip tight enough to crack the screen, she hits the call button in response. It connects, but no one speaks.

“Come to my apartment,” she finally demands of the silence on the other end of the line.

A beat, and, “It’s too risky.”

“I don’t give a shit.” Hangs up.

She wants to remember it in the place that she lives.

-

A soft rapping on her bedroom window alerts her to his presence. She treads lightly from the living room couch where she’d been waiting. Doesn’t turn on the lights so that she can see him clearly on the other side of the glass. The right side of her bed is less than a foot away from the wall; she sits on the edge, knees touching the windowsill, and simply looks.

He’s not the black-eyed skeleton, the dead man. And he’s not hiding behind an overgrown beard. Looks like the framed photographs in his old home. The one she’d broken into. The pictures she’d stolen. And not.

When she opens the window with firm, determined movements, he doesn’t budge from his perch on the fire escape.

He’s ready for her to unload on him. “Say what you gotta say.”

She reaches out and gathers the thick material of his sweater at chest-level into a tight fist. Crushes her upper body to his with that arm wedged in between. Kisses him. If he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. Both of their mouths open at the first brush, hungry, eager to suck the air out of the other. It’s like breathing for the first time in years. It’s like drowning. He circles an arm around her waist and tries to pull her outside, but she yanks him back down into her bed instead, her whole body clinging to his.

Their hands are shaking to touch.

He holds her down lightly by the wrists until she shakes her head, her teeth snagging against his bottom lip, his cheek, his chin. Lets her reposition their bodies so that she’s on top.

“Kare—”

“Just give me this,” she begs. “Please.”

They’re plastered together too tightly to take off their clothes properly. They shove and twist, his hand loops around one side of her underwear and rips. Works her, the pad of his middle finger circling her clit, sliding down to wet his fingers, and repeating the motion. Again. Again. Mouth hot on her collarbone, he uses his free hand to stretch the pliant collar of the jersey sleep shirt she’s wearing to its limit. Sucks at the upper swell of her breast bared to him, and then her nipple through the fabric.

She spreads her legs, knees digging into the mattress, and fumbles to open his belt and jeans. Grasps the length of him and pumps until he groans, forgets the frenzy he’d been bringing her to. When she tries to look down at her hand on him, her hair resists, strands of it in his mouth.

There’s a box of condoms in her bedside table. There is a box of condoms in her bedside table. Sinks down around him without protection, and cries out at how good it feels to take him inside of her. The stretch, the friction. It doesn’t last—he pulls out of her to come, the sticky fluid on her thighs and clothes and pooling into the fitted sheet.

His breaths strain to make it past his lips, eyes glassy and lidded as he reaches down to finger her again. She’s a light touch. Eyes adjusting to the dark, watches him watch her as she orgasms, bucking against his hand to try and drag a second one out of herself after that.

“Go on,” he rasps. “Go on.”

She does.  



End file.
